Aesthetics in a Cross-cultural Perspective Some Reflections on - Howard Morphy

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    Aesthetics in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: some reflections onNative American basketry

    Howard Morphy, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

    Reprinted with permission from JASO, 1992, vol. 23, no. 1, pp.1--16

    Introduction

    Writing in 1904, Otis T. Mason begins his compendious work on American Indianbasketry with a reflection (or perhaps more truly a lack of reflection!) on the newlyawakened interest of that ubiquitous follower of ethnographic fashion, the privatecollector.

    In the past few years a sympathetic spirit has been awakened in the United States tokeep alive this charming Aboriginal art and to preserve its precious relics. In everyState in the Union will be found rich collections, both in public and private museums.People vie with one another in owning them. It is almost a disease, which might becalled 'canastromania'. They resemble the merchantman seeking goodly pearls,who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all he had andbought it. The genuine enthusiasm kindled in the search, the pride of success inacquisition, the care bestowed on them, witness that the basket is a worthy object ofstudy. The story is told of a distinguished collector who walked many a weary mile tothe shelter of a celebrated old weaver. He spent the day admiring her work, but still

    asking for something better. He knew she had made finer pieces. At last flattery andgold won. She tore out the back of her hut and there, hid from mortal eyes, was thebasket that was to be burned at her death. Nothing could be more beautiful and it willbe her monument. (Mason 1988: ix)

    The paragraph would provide an excellent text for a critical sermon on ethnographicmuseums, the presuppositions of early twentieth-century collectors of ethnographyand primitive art, the post-colonial context of production, the inequalities in therelationship between Native Americans and the colonial admirers of their artefacts,and any number of other themes. The text is so redolent with the assumptions of thetime that it is hard to resist littering the quotation with paranthetical sics' and

    exclamation marks. One cannot help hoping that as soon as the collector left, thebasketmaker replaced the missing basket with the next one in line for burning.However, as with any text that presents so clearly the presuppositions of its times, itis too easy to treat it unfairly and ahistorically as if it were written today.

    The themes that I want to take up in this chapter are as controversial today as theywere at the time that Mason was writing. They concern whether objects of othercultures should be presented as aesthetic forms or as art, and the extent to whichpresentation as art involves a distortion or appropriation of value. Underlying thesethemes is the question of the relationship between the aesthetic qualities of anobject as viewed by its Western public and its aesthetic qualities as viewed by its

    producer, which question in turn has embedded within it the general issue of the

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    usefulness, and even the validity, of the notion of aesthetics for cross-culturalanalysis(1).

    James Clifford (1991: 241) has written that one of the best ways to give crosscultural value (moral commercial) to a cultural production is to treat it as art.' Masons

    writing is clearly a part of this process and illustrates particularly well the linkagebetween what Clifford refers to as the moral and commercial dimension of value.The value (as a worthy object of study) is proved by the interest of the collector,who is prepared to invest large sums in acquiring an object of beauty or aestheticvalue. The basket on the pedestal in the museum becomes the ultimate monumentto its creator. On the other hand, in his radically titled Toward an anti-catalogue ofwoodsplint basketry, Russell Handsman (1987:147) notes: When seen as art,artifacts [are] separated from their human, historical and political relations'. As theystand the two perspectives are not necessarily incompatible, depending on theparticular concept of art applied. Certainly it could be argued, as Handsman does,that the exhibition of ethnographic objects as 'art' often involves the imposition of a

    nineteenth-century Western European concept, whose application incorporates theobjects of other cultures within the framework of Western European values andblocks understanding of their indigenous meaning and cultural context. Moreover,the concept of 'art' can mask the process by which the object was acquired: basketdiverted by flattery and gold from funeral pyre is unlikely to be part of the label.These dangers are certainly there in the aestheticization of the works of othercultures. However I would argue that the fault lies not just in the overall context ofexhibitions, but also in the particular concept of aesthetics employed. An exhibitionmay simultaneously use the concept of art as a means of focusing attention on a setof objects in a way that asserts the value of the products of another culture, and yetsimultaneously draw attention to the wider context of the objects in their indigenous

    frame. Used reflexively the exhibition of ethnography as 'art' may involve arepositioning of the concept of art itself that moves it away from its 19th Centurymeanings, towards one that is more relevant to the particular cross-culturaldiscourse concerned.

    The incorporation of things within a unitary category of objects that are defined asart objects, which are to be viewed together as an exclusive set specifically for theiraesthetic effect, is what appropriates their cultural value and history andsubordinates them to Western values. If, rather than seeing aesthetics as referring tothis unitary category of objects, we see it as a dimension that any object canpotentially possess, then the danger of imposing one set of values over others can

    be avoided. Instead, we may be able to enter into a cross-cultural discourse aboutthe aesthetic potential of objects. Handsman is certainly right to say that such adiscourse requires more than the display of objects on a pedestal in a particular light,and indeed more than the simple presentation of the objects. Such an impoverishedand narrow conception of the way in which the aesthetic dimension of an object canbe appreciated is indeed an imposition of taste that narrows rather than opens upthe possibilities of cross-cultural appreciation. Handsman and McMullen (1987:34)go so far as to suggest that when presented and interpreted as art, splint basketswere not and cannot be read as artifacts of specific societies. However, byidentifying aesthetics and art with nineteenth-century values they may be falling intoa trap : by defining art and aesthetics ethnocentrically they deny the possibility oftheir existence in other cultures. By creating the category art in relation to aparticular kind of non-functional aesthetic display valuable, associated with whatBrook (1986) refers to as the 'gemstone' model of art, our predecessors appropriated

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    not simply the objects that were put into that category but also the concept of artitself. For a while, 'art became limited to a certain category of objects. This definitionis not only subject to an anthropological critique, but was also subject to criticismfrom Western art producers.

    Art across cultures

    The word art defies simple definition. Historically 'art' can best be treated as anumber of different words whose meaning varies depending on who is using theterm and when. But it is possible to suggest some core components that seem to becommon to most of its usages. The defining characteristics of art objects' or theartistic dimension of objects' tend to include references to their aesthetic properties,to their effect on the senses, and to their expression of meaning and value. Whilenot all objects labelled as art share every one of these characteristics, they tend toform part of a polythetic set with overlapping attributes. The narrow Western

    definition of art, with its category of set-aside objects, is misleading because it hasappropriated many of the more general ideas that lie behind the concept andbecause it has added so many irrelevant exclusion clauses. Art objects becomeobjects that have no other function, or are the product of individual creativity, or aredefined according to innumerable other criteria that were signs of the myths of aparticular period of history and a particular ideology, whether free-enterprisecapitalism or socialist realism.

    Guss (1989) addresses this issue in a rich analysis of the basketry of the Yekuana, apeople of the Upper Orinoco River in Venezuela. He argues that while the Yekuanado not have a word for art, they do distinguish between works that are manufactured

    under the guidelines of traditional design, tidiuma and the mass of goods that theyacquire through trade mesoma: Mesoma remains a synonym for any insipid alienobject (ibid: 69). He argues that tidiuma, on the other hand, combine, in theirmanufacture, raw materials and use, a fusion of symbolic elements and functionalvalues: in making and using them individuals continually recreate the cultural valuesand physical and metaphysical processes of which they are a part: To become aYekuana is not only to develop the physical skills demanded of ones gender, butalso to develop the spiritual awareness that the preparation of these goods imparts.In a society that has no special category for a work of 'art', there can be no objectthat is not one. Or to put it another way, to become a true Yekuana is to become anartist. (ibid: 70)

    At first sight Gusss analysis seems to contain a paradox: he begins by stating thatthe Yekuana have no word for art and yet ends up by stating that to become a trueYekuana is to become an artist. Is there simply a lexical gap in Yekuana that is filledby the English term? Is Guss writing rhetorically? Or is this simply a case of muddledthinking? The answer is, most likely, none of these but lies in the problem of culturalrelativism and the limitations of ordinary language, though rhetoric too may play apart. From a cultural-relativist perspective, concepts are defined according to theparticular context in which they occur: it is not anticipated that the concept of art willbe any different from such concepts as marriage, or a relative, or conception', inthat they all vary cross-culturally. Yet the very fact that we are applying the terms andseeking the equivalent concepts across cultures implies that we have a more generalconcept that transcends the particular case and is part of the anthropologistsmetalanguage. What Guss is saying, then, is that what he understands by, or

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    defines as, the concept of art is found in something of the activities of everyYekuana. By definition, that concept could or should not be identical to the WesternEuropean concept of art, since that concept in turn will be relative to its culturalcontext and hence be culture-bound(2). The metaconcept is related to the Westernconcept since anthropologist begin their comparative enterprise from their own

    culture, and in its recent origins, at least, anthropology is a Western science. Theconcept should be defined independently of but necessarily with reference to, theordinary-language usage of the word art.

    The situation is though, even more complex than this. The Western concept of art isitself a many-headed monster, with analysts and theoreticians continually strugglingto change its definition. Indeed, the arts of non-Western peoples, folk art andOriental art have all been used by artists as part of their intra-cultural dialogueattempting to inspire Western practice and change Western concepts. Thus theanalyses that anthropologists or art historians make of the arts of other cultures canin turn have consequences for Western art: unlike the Yekuana, Western artists are

    attuned to seeing aesthetic value in other peoples cultural products. Thepresentation of Yekuana basketry as art, the assertion that it has an aestheticdimension, that it is a sculptural form, is both a challenge to the Western category ofart and at the same time, if it is successful, something that results in a broadening ofthe category(3). The Western category of art, responds to criticism, Anaconda-like,by swallowing it whole. It is broad in ways that the Yekuana category is narrow. TheYekuana do not recognize any cultural value in objects introduced from outside forfunctional purposes. Western cultures, on the other hand, consume throughaesthetics the objects of other cultures and discard their functions. The basketbecomes a sculptural form, no longer a container for grain or a plate for cassava.This paradox has something to do with economic processes and the articulation of

    modes of production, but also has much to do with cultural differences. Whatever thecause, one of the consequences has been that while people of the Fourth Worldstop producing baskets and replace them with plastic containers and recycledproducts from the industrialized world (which they may or may not valueaesthetically), the industrialized world exhibit Fourth World products as works of artand increases their value.

    Exhibiting art

    When trying to persuade a Western public of the aesthetic dimension of otherpeoples material culture, anthropologists present their arguments not only through

    their writings but also by organizing exhibitions of other peoples work as art. And aswe have seen, it is in the context of the art gallery that the Western definition of artand the anthropological metaconcept of art have the opportunity to get almostinextricably muddled. As Luke Taylor (1988: 93) has written: why is it that we findobjects from other cultures so beautiful, even though we know at some level, theaesthetic values objectified in the works must be culture specific? Clearly anemphasis on the culture specific qualities of aesthetic values is not sufficient todescribe the complexities of the situation.

    There are two reasons why exhibition as art became an almost inevitable part ofanthropologists presentation of their case. First, part of the metadefinition of artinvolves aesthetics, and one of the Western ways of communicating the aestheticproperties of an object is through exhibition. Secondly, part of the cultural-relativistagenda is to signify the essential equivalence of world cultures by a metaphysical

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    criterion of equal cultural value. Value in this context is intra-cultural the crosscultural component is that value is created in each case in its terms of the culturalsystem of which it is a part. The cultural relativist demonstrates the equivalence ofthis difference by explicating the values of the particular culture in terms of its ownprocesses of reproduction and drawing attention to analogous processes operating

    in other cultural contexts, and/or, by using rhetorical devices that assert that objectsor processes of similar value exist in different cultures, and that it is possible for amember of one culture to appreciate value as it exists to a member of anotherthrough a process of cultural translation. 'Art' as a rhetorical device in this context isused to carry the connotations of art as high cultural value over to the objects andultimately the agents of 'other' cultures. They produce objects of 'art' therefore theyare of equal value to us, even though the 'art' they produce is different. In the formercase rather than asserting the equivalence of value the anthropologist is arguingthat, from a cross-cultural perspective value is value neutral. In the second case themore positive assertion that all cultures are of equal value, is being made. Theagenda grew out of opposition to nineteenth-century evolutionary schema that

    created out of the world's cultures a graded series in which those at the top had art,science, and civilization and those at the bottom did not. This imposition of aparticularly culture-bound definition of art, in association with a colonialist ideology,denied art to many cultures and, since art was one of the signs of civilisation,devalued the things they produced. George Kubler (1991: 84) has written about thedistaste for America in European thought and literature:

    The distaste was and remains a negative aesthetic expression about America andAmericans during the Enlightenment, and it survives in Europe and elsewhere to thisday. the dominant belief in enlightened Europe, from 1750 to 1900, was thatAmerica was inferior as to its natural and racial endowment. Buffon as a naturalist in

    1759 deprecated the animal species as inferior and the humans in ancient Americaas 'impotent and savage'. Kants verdict as a philosopher in 1778 thatAmerindians were 'incapable of any culture, still far behind the negroes' wasfollowed by Hegels 'immature and impotent continent.

    It is against this background that we should see the work of such early museumethnographers Mason and W. H. Holmes and the even more fundamentalcontribution of Franz Boas. They were concerned to communicate the aestheticfeatures of Native American material culture through the development of collectionsand the organization of exhibitions as well as through their writings. In doing so theywere involved in a process of asserting the value of Native American culture and way

    of life, making Native Americans visible again as people and showing them in apositive light.

    The initial division between ethnographic museums, where Native American artswere shown, and art galleries, where art in the European tradition was exhibited, wasin itself a continuing imposition of the Western concept of art. In one sense, thefailure to divide the products of Native American cultures into art and non-art wouldhave accorded with Yekuana classifications, but in another sense it represented thecontinued subordination of Native American artefacts to the evolutionary schema.This contradiction cannot easily be resolved. If only certain works are selected forinclusion within the art gallery, being chosen either on arbitrary aesthetic grounds orby analogy with Western categories of art objectsfor example, objects with painteddesigns then that continues the process of appropriation; the objects arereclassified without reference to indigenous values. It is here that exhibiting

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    ethnographic objects as art becomes part of a radical critique of art galleries: itprovides a challenge to narrowly constructed definitions of art and to the separationof art from artefact that was the product of a particular period of European history.And though it can be argued that this strategy also incorporates artefacts withinglobal processes that are essentially part of a Western agenda, it has the advantage

    of doing so by making people reflect on other peoples categories and otherconstructions of the world.

    Other peoples aesthetics

    In discussing the exhibition of products of the Fourth world (see Graburn 1976), ofother cultures, as aesthetic objects, it is helpful to make an initial distinctionbetween the aesthetics of the producing culture and the aesthetics of the exhibitingculture (though we shall see that the distinction is not an easy one to maintain). Tobegin with, we will assume that the distinction is a strong one and accept thecultural-relativist position that different cultures have different and relatively

    autonomous aesthetic traditions. What is beautiful to members of one culture maynot be to members of another, or, to phrase it more generally, the aestheticsensibilities of one culture may differ radically from those of another. The sameobject may be seen, felt, or appreciated in different ways and on the basis ofdifferent attributes, to the extent that it may, arguably, become a different object. Totake an apparently extreme and hypothetical example, in one case aesthetics mightinclude how the object smelled and in the other might focus on attributes of shape. Ifan object from the former culture were exhibited on the basis of its shape andsurface form, then it would be treated in terms of the aesthetics of the exhibitorrather than the producer. In the case of basketry it is quite conceivable that matterssuch as the smell or the feel of the basket, as well as its appearance, should be part

    of its aesthetics for the producer. It is worth quoting at length Trudie Lamb Richmond(1989:127-8), herself a Native American, writing about Schaghticoke basketry:

    To understand and appreciate Native American basket-making fully, one must makethe transition in thinking from materialism to spiritualism. I spoke to a Mohawkbasket-maker not long ago and asked her how she felt about weaving sweet grassinto her baskets. Sweet grass is used by her people in their ceremonies and liketobacco is believed to have great power. She told me she had thought about thismeaning and that was why she always talked to the sweet grass and to her basketsas she made them. She said that she asked forgiveness for having to sell thebaskets, but that she needed the money to survive. Using the sweet grass would

    keep the baskets strong and alive, and she hoped that people who bought themwould appreciate their significance. The basket weaver explained that she neverpicked the grass without making a tobacco offering.

    The particular raw material used will usually have an impact on the visible form ofthe object, but this is not always going to be the case. Moreover, the aestheticappreciation of that visible form may be enhanced by knowledge of the properties ofthe raw materials used and their cultural significance. It is sometimes difficult, evenimpossible, for museums to allow their public access to the full aesthetic potential ofan object, since touching the object may transgress the requirements ofconservation, and smell, like colour, fades with time. However, it should always be

    possible to draw the publics attention to the existence of such properties.Aesthetic relativism thus applies in the case of the non-visible properties of objectsand to the intersection of form and cultural meaning. But it also applies in the case of

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    observable form. When considering shape alone there is no reason to suppose thatthe attributes of observable form that were appreciated by the maker and are part ofthe objects intended form are going necessarily to be the ones seized on by theconsuming or exhibiting culture. Mason (1904:142) sets out what he considers to bethe basis of the aesthetics of Native American basketry: Unity in variety, the

    underlying principle in all aesthetic composition, finds its first step illustrated in themaking up of a basket. The unity is of a very high order for in many examples,coupled with a monotony of elements absolutely under the control of the artist, thereis at the same time a charming variation of width and length in harmony with, andmade necessary by, the widening and narrowing of the basket. Usually theperfection of stitch is the aim of the worker.

    And in the following paragraphs after a catalogue-type entry, he provides a lyricaldescription of a Washoe basket that efficiently summarizes a whole range ofattributes that go into the Western appreciation of a basketry form:

    A rare coiled basket made by a Washoe woman named Datsolalee. It is in thecollection of A. Cohn, Carson City Nevada. The piece measures 8 1/2 inches high, is12 inches wide, and 6 inches wide at the opening. The stitches number more thanfifty thousand, being thirty to the inch. The body colour is a rich light gold, and thefigures are in red and black. It weighs 16 ounces and is valued at many hundreds ofdollars. The figures on the basket represent birds migrating or flying away, the mottobeing, When the birds leave their nests and fly away we shall move. The shape ofthe piece and the quality of sentiments in the markings are excelled only by theinimitable quality of the work on the surface. It is difficult to conceive a more perfectlyuniform piece of handiwork than this. (ibid)

    It is easy to see how this description comes out of his theoretical framework, relatedto the technique-and-form school of Gottfried Semper. The weights and measures,the meticulous counting of stitches and the stress on uniformity, gain meaningthrough the idea that perfection arises out of the application of technique tofunctional form. There is nothing wrong with such a perspective, and it is one thathas in Masons case resulted in a magnificent examination of the relationshipbetween technique and form that can provide the basis of much further research.However, the description tells us little about the aesthetics of Washoe baskets fromthe perspective of the Washoe producer. For example, although it hints that theremay be a dimension of content that articulates with technique and form, it leaves thatunexplored. While Washoe aesthetic processes and concepts may share much in

    common with Masons interpretations of the aesthetics of their baskets, we are notpresented with any evidence that this is the case (4).

    A cross-cultural definition of aesthetics

    As Coote (1989: 237) has argued, the explication of the differences betweendifferent cultures ways of seeing should ... be the primary task of the anthropologyof aesthetics. Although it may be perfectly legitimate to see other people's worksthrough the eyes of ones own culture, the anthropologists job is to reconnectaesthetics with the culture that produced the object. However, before going on toconsider how such a reconnection can be achieved and how it might be reflected inexhibiting the works of other cultures, I can no longer postpone the task of defininga little more precisely what I include under the rubric of aesthetics. I have discussed

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    the issue of cross-cultural aesthetics in detail elsewhere (Morphy 1989, c.f. Morphy1992) and will only summarize the arguments here.

    In the case of material culture 'aesthetics' refers to the effects of properties ofobjects on the senses, to the qualitative dimension of the perception of objects. Such

    properties include physical ones, such as an objects form, surface qualities, feel andsmell. They may also include non-material attributes of the object that are signifiedby it or associated with it, such as the attribute of age or distant place or magicalsubstance. In relation to physical properties these stand as connotation todenotation. Many of the physical properties are apprehended cross-culturally.Attributes such as weight, shininess, softness, perhaps even symmetry and balance,are analogous to electricity in that they can have an impact on the nervous systemirrespective of the cultural background of the person experiencing them. Theexistence of the non-material attributes presupposes cultural knowledge.

    The properties of the object are not in themselves aesthetic properties, any more

    than an electric shock is. They become aesthetic properties through theirincorporation within systems of value and meaning that integrate them within culturalprocesses. Shininess and symmetry, as aesthetic properties, are interpreted orappreciated on the basis of certain evaluative criteria that in simple terms causethem to be viewed positively or negatively, either in themselves or in relation to otherproperties or combinations of properties. This value converts an abstract or almostphysical property into an aesthetic quality, and this quality cannot be assumed to beinvariant across cultural boundaries. The aesthetic quality may in turn be linked toparticular cultural meanings, and these too can vary cross-culturally. One of theclassic examples of the incorporation of aesthetic properties of objects within anoverall system of value occurs in the case of the Massim region of Papua New

    Guinea, where the property of heaviness is associated with land, agriculturalproduction and femaleness, and lightness is associated with voyaging, exchange ofgoods and male careers (see Munn 1986:80 ff.). Thus aesthetics involves not simplyhow something looks and is appreciated, but also how it is felt and understood. Thisinsight illustrates both the difficulties and the potentialities of communicatingaesthetic values cross-culturally. Understanding the aesthetic response of amember of another culture to an object requires suspending ones own response toit, and learning how that object and its attributes are incorporated into systems ofvalue and meaning. If one can teach people to interpret and value the properties ofthe objects of another culture according to the aesthetics of that culture then onemay provide a powerful insight into that world, and into what it feels to be a member

    of it.

    Gusss analysis of the cultural context of Yekuana basketry provides an excellentbasis for the understanding of Yekuana aesthetics. The Yekuana employ atechnique that is widespread throughout much of the Amazonian region, and manyof the designs that are found on their basketry occur throughout the region.Employing a perspective from Western aesthetics (that used by Mason, forexample), would make it difficult to differentiate between the particular cases. Yet,despite the existence of common cultural themes that cross-cut the region, we knowthat the meaning of the particular elements, and the context of their occurrence anduse, varies from place to place. Gusss particular focus is on the waja, the circularserving-trays that are used for the staple food cassava. It is impossible to summarizethe full complexity of his analysis, so I will concentrate only on a few aspects of it.

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    In a revealing section (Guss 1987:), he shows how baskets mark stages in the firstyear of a marriage. A man is expected to make nearly the full complement of basketsthat his household requires. The first basket that he weaves for his wife is a versionof a plain basket called a waja tingkuihato. It is a finely woven basket made fromcane. Although woven in a single colour, the mosaic of the weave produces a

    pattern of radiating lines referred to as kutto shidiyu (or 'frogs bottom'). It is from thisbasket that the couple eat during the first year of their marriage. At the end of theyear, the husband weaves a waja tometo (painted basket), whose pattern ismarked out by the use of alternating black and white plaits. By changing thesequences of plaiting, the technique can be used to produce an almost infinitevariety of different designs. The particular design selected is chosen afterconsultation between the man and his father, and may well be one that was used byhis father or grandfather for one of their wives. The use of the painted waja is a signthat the marriage is established: the special images woven into this painted wajawill be a clear statement of the strength and uniqueness of their bond (1989: 83)

    In order to explain the opposition between the frogs bottom baskets and the paintedbaskets, and the different contexts of their use we must consider both thesignificance of the materials of which they are made and the significance of thedesigns themselves. The plain basket is made from kana, a sacred cane that had itsorigins in heaven and was one of the original materials brought down to earth (ibid:141). It is considered both a pure and a safe substance; it is also in some senseconsidered to be pre-cultural. Plain baskets similar to the frogs bottom, but lessfinely made, are used in the context of fasts and in other situations where people areparticularly concerned with purity. The painted waja are made from two varieties ofcane that are associated with powerful and dangerous spirit familiars that can be life-threatening, unless treated with care (ibid: 127). People who are in a weak or

    spiritually dangerous condition, or who are responsible for someone in such acondition (for example, the father of a new baby), must avoid contact with the caneand eat from a plain basket. The designs themselves reflect this ambivalent status,since they represent subjects that are both potentially dangerous and of culturalvalue, for example, sources of poisons and such animals as the jaguar. For peoplewho are in a spiritually strong condition, the painted baskets can be a positive force,purifying food by symbolically removing poisonous substances, marking the identityof the person and enabling the maker to reflect on myth and cultural process. Theuse of the plain basket during the early part of a marriage can thus be seen both asprecautionary, while a potentially dangerous relationship is being established inwhich childbirth and anger are never far away, and as a sign of the newness of the

    relationship and its potential (ibid: 81). The painted basket, on the other hand, is asign of the strength of a relationship that is well established and marks it with aparticular identity. It links the marriage with the history of a family and of a culture.

    Thus, for the Yekuana, the aesthetics of their basketry involves its integration withina cultural context in which the form of a basket and the contexts of its use togetherprovide part of the framework of the Yekuana world. The value of the plain basketexists in relation to the value of the painted basket, and a Yekuana appreciation ofits form will involve the understanding of its significance as an object of purity, aconnotation that can be equally conveyed by its material, technique, design, andfunction coordinated to communicate the same message (ibid: 146).

    It might be argued that what Guss's fine analysis has produced is the elucidation ofthe cultural value of Yekuana baskets rather more than an exposition of their

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    aesthetics - the aesthetics if anything is the anthropologist's aesthetics as he or shedelights at the way in which cultural meanings can be read into everyday materialobjects. (5) My response to such an argument would be to both reject it and acceptit. It may be rejected in the sense that the cultural meanings are going to affect theway in which objects are perceived, and are going to be integral to the ways in which

    the forms of the objects have an impact on the senses. Aesthetic perceptions andconceptions are part of a cultural system. The aesthetic effects of objects are notonly part of value-creating processes, but are also affected in turn by the valuesgiven to them and the meanings of objects into which people are socialized. Whilethe meanings of plain as opposed to painted waja are not in themselves aestheticvalues, they are likely to influence the aesthetic perception of baskets of therespective types, and can be part of the way in which an aesthetic system isculturally structured through the consistent association of perceived form withemotional content. On a priori grounds, the aesthetics of a painted waja is going tobe different for someone who associates it with potentially dangerous forces andsubstances, from what it is for someone who sees it only as a design form. The

    emphasis on cultural knowledge, on the cultural semiotics and connotations of theobjects, is a necessary counter to those who see knowledge of meaning and contextalmost as an impediment to aesthetic appreciation.

    However, although analysis of cultural meanings is a necessary component of ananthropological study of aesthetics, it should be made clear that I do not intend toreduce aesthetics to cultural meaning or context. In order to analyse the aestheticdimension of a particular object, it is necessary to go beyond sketching in the culturalbackground to an examination of the particular way in which the object isappreciated, perceived and evaluated as a form by members of that culture, and toshow how the creation of an aesthetic effect is explicitly or implicitly part of the

    intentional production of perceivable form. The task of the anthropologist is to elicitinterpretations, take note of the data and observe the structurings of effects acrossmedia, that fill in the gap between cultural analysis and the objects as experiencedby members of the culture.

    Conclusion: basketry, aesthetics and colonialism

    Even with the information we now have, we do not know how the Yekuana see theirbasketry, how they divide it up into components, how baskets fit into with their worldof perception. As Forge (1970: 286) wrote, it is impossible literally to see through theeyes of another man, let alone perceive with his brain. Yet if we are to consider the

    place of art in any society...we must beware of assuming that they see what we seeand vice versa. An anthropology of perception, if such existed, might enable us toget closer, but to see as the Yekuana do would require that we were socialized intotheir world, and that we were used to the light and shade and the sounds and smellsof the rain forest. But the ethnography does give us a greater understanding of whatand how the baskets mean to the Yekuana, and provides a perspective on how toview them and how to value them. With this information we certainly do not see thebaskets as we saw them before, and we may have shifted a little closer to theYekuana view. We appreciate the baskets as the Yekuana do, on the basis of theirform, texture, colour, and even smell; and knowledge of the way these aspects areculturally valued brings us closer to the Yekuana aesthetic system and enables usto reflect on whether the form, texture, colour and smell are the same for them asthey are for us.

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    In most cases we do not have this quality of information concerning the culturalsignificance of objects. Moreover, exhibitions usually consist of objects from manydifferent cultures, with only one or two examples from each place. This is partlybecause of the nature of the collections, partly because of strict criteria of aestheticselection (the only the best examples will do syndrome) and partly because there

    are many reasons other than the aesthetics of a particular cultural tradition thatmotivate the exhibitor. The exhibition may be designed to display regional variation,or the effect of different techniques on form, or the impact of European contact ondesign. But rather than seeing such exhibitions as fundamentally wrong andmisguided, we can draw more positive lessons from our discussion of Yekuanaaesthetics.

    We have learned that it is possible to gain insights into other peoples aesthetictraditions. Using a variety of different sources of information the objectsthemselves, written texts and labels, film, photography, dioramas it would bepossible to create a museum exhibition that was designed specifically to evoke and

    inform about the aesthetics of another culture. Indeed, it might beargued that in designing ethnographic exhibitions anthropologists should be able tohelp people see the objects in that light, and should always be aware of the dangersinherent in subordination to an alien aesthetic tradition. Once people are attuned tothe idea that other aesthetics exist that there are ways of understanding a set ofobjects that are separate from the canons of our own taste and outside the historicaltradition of our own art then it is a lesson that can be applied even in cases wherethe viewer is ignorant or where information is lacking. The aesthetic contemplation ofthe objects of other cultures in the light of knowledge of cultural differenceencourages people to reflect on the meanings that may be there and on their culturalvalue, and encourages them to look beyond surface form. Focus on the aesthetic

    dimension could provide a source of information about other cultures, just as muchas any so-called objective abstraction from the object, such as its function, can.

    Such is the complex nature of human cultures that any way of exhibiting objectsinvolves selection and simplification. Seeing objects as functional types, or regionaltypes, or frozen in some pastiche of their cultural context in the form of a diorama,can be as misleading as displaying them on pedestals as art, and is just as likely toconfirm cultural stereotypes. Exhibiting as art does have benefits. If the historicalcontext is right, then the assertion of the value of the objects as art can play a partin the process that results in the acknowledgement of the equal humanity andcultural achievement of the producers, which can have consequences for the

    recognition of their rights. It can even have economic consequences: products thatare no longer used to store grain can be produced for sale to the market, resulting ina form of economic integration that, paradoxically, can help to maintain andperpetuate cultural differences through a process of cultural transformation.

    The manufacture of objects for sale inevitably results in an interchange of value andin the migration of aesthetic concepts. However, this neither lessens the authenticityof the objects nor makes them into alien products, but merely adds another screenthrough which to view the complex, emergent image of cross-cultural aesthetics.Aesthetic systems have never been in reality neatly packaged into discrete boxeslabelled with the names of individual cultures. Although, as a symbolic system,Yekuana baskets seem to fit together in a neat package, they have always beentraded with neighbouring groups, who shared many of the same designs and

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    symbolic themes and defined themselves in relation to those themes. Coherence iscreated through flux.

    Native American basketry exists as part of a regional network of trade and exchangein which styles change over time and in which aesthetic appreciation of neighbouring

    styles must always have been a factor. Trade with Europeans added anotherdimension to basketmaking, albeit one that for most of its duration has beenindissolubly linked with the colonial process and has had the strands of domination,expropriation and exploitation woven into its being. But together with these are otherstrands of more positive origin, consisting of the aspiration of the weaver, thestruggle to survive, to engage the other and to define the self. The overall mosaic, asHandsman suggests, was a fusion of colonial process and indigenous struggle. Thebaskets woven and traded became instruments of survival, which in more positivetimes could become objects of reflection and a basis for the continued assertion ofcultural identity. Reflecting on the aesthetics of Native American basketry meansreflecting on the aesthetics of particular cultures, and on the interchange of

    aesthetics and values between Native Americans and Europeans. But it also meansreflecting on the fear, hostility, appropriation, dispossession and alienation that lies inbetween.

    This is an expanded version of a Chapter written originally for a catalogue of anexhibition to be held at the Pit Rivers Museum entitled, 'Basketmakers: form andmeaning in Native American basketry" (see Mowat L., Morphy H., and Dransart P.1992). I am grateful to the editors of JASO for encouraging me to produce this fullerversion of the text and for the critical comments of Jeremy Coote, Frances Morphy,

    Linda Mowat and Penny Dransart in forcing me to clarify the arguements in earlierversions of the text.

    1) A relevant debate took place in 1986 over Art and Land, an exhibition at the SouthAustralian Museum, in which a set of Aboriginal direction signs from CentralAustralia were exhibited deliberately as 'art' (see Jones and Sutton 1986; Brook1986; and Sutton 1987; the debate is summarized in Taylor 1988). Susan Vogel's(1991) account of multi-perspective exhibitions of ethnographic objects considerssimilar issues in the case of African 'Art'.

    2) The perspective on the comparative method developed by Marilyn Strathern

    (1988: 8) is very relevant to the cross-cultural study of art: Comparative procedure,investigating variables across societies, normally decontextualises local constructs inorder to work with context bound analytic ones.... The study of symbolic systemspresents a different problematic.... The task is not to imagine one can replaceexogenous concepts by indigenous counterparts, rather the task is to convey thecomplexity of indigenous concepts in reference to the particular context in which theyare produced. Hence I choose to show the contextualised nature of indigenousconstructs by exposing the contextualised nature of analytical ones.'

    Indeed, I would argue that one of the main achievements or evenconsequences of the anthropology of art has been to pose questions about theWestern category and concept of art and to expose its contextualized nature.

    3)The corollary of this is that Western art history must also be, in Sutton's (1987)terms, 'additive'.

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    4) There have been a few studies that have attempted to elicit the aesthetic criteriaemployed by Native American basketmakers, one of the most substantial being thecomparatively early study by O'Neil (1932) of the Yurok-Karok of North California. he study was based on short-term fieldwork and fails to explore the indigenous

    categories or to consider the connotations of particular forms. Moreover, thequestions of emotional effect and the language of aesthetic appreciation from anemic viewpoint are hardly considered. I am grateful to Ed Carter for making meaware of O'Neale's work.

    5) I am grateful to Jeremy Coote for forcing me to address this issue explicitly.

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    and Lavine, pp.212-54.

    Coote, Jeremy. 1989. The Anthropology of Aesthetics and the Dangers of"Maquetcentricism" JASO, VolXX no3: pp. 229-243.

    Forge, Anthony. 1970. Learning to See in New Guinea In A Mayer (ed.),Socialization: The approach from Social Anthropology [A.S.A. Monographs 8],London: Tavistock, pp. 269-291.

    Graburn, Nelson H. H., (ed.) 1976. Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressionsfrom the Fourth World, Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Guss, David M. 1989. To Weave and Sing: Art, symbol and Narrative in the SouthAmerican Rainforest. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Handsman, Russell 1987. Stop Making Sense: Towards and Anti-Catalogue ofWoodsplint Basketry, in McMullen and Handsman, pp. 144-63.

    Handsman Russell. and Anne McMullen. 1987. 'An Introduction to WoodsplintBasketry and its Interpretation', in McMullen and Handsman, pp. 16-35.

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    Morphy, Howard. 1989. From Dull to Brilliant: the Aesthetics of Spiritual Poweramong the Yolngu, Man (NS) 24(1): 21-40.

    1992. 'From dull to brilliant: the Aesthetics of Spiritual Power among the Yolngu',in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Sheldon (eds.), Anthropology Art and Aesthetics(Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Cultural Form), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.181-208 (revised version of Morphy 1989).

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